


Another Summer of Love

by anonlytree



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M, but I know it's what you wanted to read querida, listen I get to make fun of his manangst because I care OK, pretentious character study is pretentious, the obligatory soundtrack is just an inside joke at this point, this is NOT what I started writing two months ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 21:34:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11791914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonlytree/pseuds/anonlytree
Summary: It's his party and he'll sulk if he wants to.





	Another Summer of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anaile20GH](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anaile20GH/gifts).



Xabi thinks he sees a flicker of recognition in the bass player's eyes, a look that doesn't spell:

_"I've seen you lift the Cup on TV."_

but rather:

_"I know you from that bar in Malasaña, don't I?"_

It's not unlikely, Xabi thinks; he might have fucked this young man's girlfriend at some point. Madrid can be a big village sometimes.

He stares at the bass player across the rooftop. The thrum of the party rises over a DJ set now that the band has dispersed to the smokers' pen on the balcony. The young man with the half open denim shirt and a fading sunshine tattooed between his collarbones is wading through amps and instrument cases until he reaches into a cable spool behind the keyboard and picks up his beer off the floor. He looks back at Xabi. This time he wants to make sure Xabi gets it, that he has time to process the look in his eyes:

" _Hombre,_ _everybody's got bills to pay. I won't tell if you don't._ "

Xabi watches him walk away to roll himself a cigarette and knows he's never met this young man. A boy, really. A boy who's in a soft jazz cover band on the weekends. A boy who's probably classically trained, who dreams of recording his experimental pieces one day when he no longer has to play these kinds of gigs and feels ashamed to be taking Xabi's money. A young man who's too young to have played in one of the Malasaña bars Xabi used to frequent half a decade ago.

Xabi's been reabsorbed by Madrid with such seamless ease, it's easy to forget it was that long ago. The summer when he almost signed simultaneous divorce and transfer papers (but are they really all that different?). The city survived that summer of bread lines and banker suicides and Xabi retired in Germany. He wears his wedding ring even in the shower now, can't even tell it's there anymore.

"Shut the fuck up, Carragher! You're not drunk enough to be talking such bollocks, mate," Didi growls somewhere in the distance. "Alonso should have invited Neville to talk some sense into your thick head."

Xabi spins on his heels to see Carra doubled up and giggling, his face the glorious shade of red of the '09 home kit. He's grinning maniacally, swinging a Stella bottle between Didi, the Callejons and one of Xabi's university mates from his first (and last) year as an industrial engineering student.

One of Nagore's friends (the photographer; the psychologist had to leave early) snapped a picture of Jon dribbling an imaginary ball between Carra's legs earlier and Xabi had to scramble to the supply room in search of champagne (hard liqour before the children's bedtimes is a line he won't cross just yet). His many parallels lives overlap for this one night and Xabi wonders if the next time all these people are on the same rooftop they'll be sharing nostalgic anecdotes over his coffin. The thought makes him chuckle into his champagne glass.

He keeps forgetting that everybody here knows him from somewhere. They're all in Madrid to drink to his retirement. They're lovely people, warm and effusive with praise and well-wishes for his as of yet uncharted future. It makes Xabi feel like a fraud. Like he should maybe stop smiling at stories of six star little spa getaways on Thai islands; should stop pretending he's listening to excited cooing about the latest mindfulness fad, should stop finding unemployment jokes morbidly funny. He stops doing none of those things.

It's his party and he'll sulk if he wants to.

The one thing he will not do is touch his phone though. Xabi won't even look at it. He feels awfully smug about it.

It bothers him that Stevie's not here. It bothers him that he's bothered by the casual _'...but enjoy your evening'_ RSVP and the way the Captain knows what's best for everyone. And nothing pisses him off more than knowing that the Captain is right. Xabi doesn't trust himself to not have pulled him into the bathroom with untoward intentions by this point in the evening-old, creaky knees be damned. People don't change, he knows this. He knows he has simply adapted to a new set of circumstances. 2012 Xabi hasn't gone anywhere, he's just staring down a lifetime of damage limitation.

He still does not understand how Stevie can pour his heart out to a Bayern reporter, how he can say words like _missed_ and _you_ and _every day_ (fucking hell) to a camera (Xabi can't rewatch it, death would be kinder) and not be here with Carra and Pako tonight.

He won't touch his phone. He's dying for a cigarette. He realizes there's nothing stopping him now that he's unemployed and the kids have long been put to bed.

 

"Mind if I borrow one? You can add it to the bill."

The bass player doesn't look surprised. He puts his half empty beer on the balcony railing, reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his tobacco pouch.

"I'll be sure to tell our accountant to charge you," he says and Xabi can't quite place the accent—any generic sun-baked town from the depopulated dust bowl around Madrid, or even further North. Zamora maybe, if anybody actually ever came from Zamora.

Xabi won't ask him, doesn't want to know his name either. He feels like he knows everything there is to know about the guy already. He's got a three day stubble and warm, inviting eyes shaded by long lashes.

Xabi leans his elbows against the railing, keeps his eyes out on the night lights twinkling below.

"Unless you wanna do the honors," the young man says, holding up the filter. He wears a thin strip of leather knitted into a bracelet. Xabi feels like such a cliché.

He chuckles, looks down at his clasped hands.

"We'd be here all night," he says, watching the bass player sprinkle the dried up loose leaf into the paper with minute, precise movements. Xabi paid no mind to his performance on stage, busy laughing at ol' timey anecdotes with teammates from three different countries, but he can't take his eyes off his fingers now.

"Don't tell me it's your first taste of freedom after retirement."

"No, is just—I was a Marlboro man before I quit ten years ago."

"I feel even more responsible then," the young man says. The tip of his tongue drags across the edge of the filter paper, back and forth. "Did they make you quit for the football?"

"No, we both quit before our son was born," Xabi says, teetering on the border between honesty and self-delusion and landing in the safe demilitarized zone of half-truths where he's lived most of his adult life now. How could he ever explain that the line between football and not-football had never been more blurred than in those days?

 

  
_"You got Bellamy to smuggle ciggies in for you again?" Stevie gasps, biting into Xabi's lower lip and tightening his grip on his wrists._

_"Yes, and it was not cheap," Xabi says, arching his hips to express his displeasure at Stevie's dick no longer rubbing against his own._

_"What if I told Rafa, eh?"_

_"Wanna explain to him how you test me?" Xabi says, shoving his tongue back in Stevie's mouth, which distracts his Captain enough to allow Xabi to escape his grip and flip him over on his back._

 

  
Xabi slips the rollup between his lips and leans into the bass player's cupped hands towards the flickering flame. His warm smell of cheap cologne mixed with tobacco wafts up in the diminishing space between their bodies.

The flame dies out before Xabi's cigarette is lit. It sparks back up again and Xabi covers the young man's hands with his own to protect it. A second long drag that stings Xabi's throat does the trick but the bass player's hands aren't going anywhere. His thumb reaches out to stroke Xabi's knuckles, making its way to its wedding ring. He fingers it for a few seconds, leans closer to whisper something to Xabi but his brain is too frozen to understand the words he hears. They're still standing on a balcony, two pairs of hands wrapped around a disposable lighter and Xabi's cigarette burning away quietly in the corner of his mouth.

He yanks it out for want of doing something, anything, as the bass player's hand slips past all the buttons on Xabi's dark shirt and settles on his crotch. He gives him two quick squeezes that make Xabi exhale quicker than his lungs can cope with the tobacco hit. The young man settles into a rhythm as Xabi's heart seizes in his chest. He could do this, he could get off with a twenty something kid on a balcony, with his wife's friends chattering away within hearing distance. He's always known this is what he's up against. If this is a test, he's already failed it, and not just because his hips are moving in time with the bass player's wrist. That's the lesser of his fuck-ups.

The part he'll never disclose in any mea culpa in front of the marriage counselor is how his free hand comes up, his fingers tracing the sunshine tattooed above the young man's pulse point. How he knows there's only one reason he gasps:

"I... can't... I..."

The pressure stops although the hand doesn't move away at first.

"I've got a phone call to make... I'm sorry," Xabi says, chugging his still lit cigarette over the railing and pulling his shirt down before he runs off down the service stairs, three at a time, his phone shaking between his fingers.

He reconsiders a call halfway down the second landing, sits down and starts typing instead.

_I think I've taken up smoking again._

 

* * *

 _I know it's not working_  
_I'm no holiday_  
_It's nobody's fault_  
_No guilty party_

**Author's Note:**

> I fought very hard against the urge to call this [Smoke Gets In Your Eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUPSj9yzKs) instead, please admire my restraint.
> 
> Oh and... never 4get his Instagram likes are sometimes a story in themselves:
> 
>  


End file.
